Phase III: Fixing an embedding problem in WordPress

One of the things I do with my photos, besides having them in a gallery, is embed them in various posts in my WordPress blog. For example, I have a section on the site dealing with an HR student conference from back in 2002, and I have a small album of photos with the conference docs. Those photos are stored with my Piwigo gallery, and embedded as a hot link in the WordPress pages. Simple, right?. But here’s the problem. The link to each photo currently says:

http://thepandafamily.smugmug.com/yada yada yada

Now that I have the new gallery up and running, if I simply delete the old one, those links won’t work. I have to change ALL of them to say:

http://www.polywogg.ca/pandafamily/yada yada yada

It isn’t a huge challenge, just under 100 posts in total with maybe 400 photos linked. But each photo or video link has to have the SmugMug link deleted and the Piwigo link pasted BEFORE I delete the SmugMug account. If I don’t do it first, then my WordPress site will suddenly have a bunch of broken links all through it and no photos showing from my gallery.

But of course it isn’t as simple as just a search and replace of the opening domain info — the “yada yada yada” is completely different for each site. So they have to be done manually. Since it is easier to do while the two galleries are both running, i.e. so I can view them side-by-side on the screen and copy the links from the new to replace the old, it is still a pain in the patootie. With the uploading and captioning done, I’m about 50% done the re-linking process. But I got my account renewal reminder the other day … SmugMug renews in less than a month and I wanted to be done before then so I won’t get charged for another year.

I did the first few, and they were easy-peasy. So I thought the “rest” would be the same. Strange, but I feel like it was both less work and more work than I expected. How can that be?

Well, I feel like there were “only 98” posts with the cross-linked photos, which seemed like a manageable number. In addition, many of them only had one or two photos, so pretty quick. All in all, that meant I was initially feeling like it was less work than I expected and would go pretty fast.

Right up until I hit some of the photo-rich posts like stories about Being Jacob’s father or various trips we took. Some of them took a LONG time to update. But the weird part is I feel like the photos are somehow “brighter”? That’s weird. I wonder if the filters and themes at Smugmug that I was using were muted somehow. Anyway, I really like how it looks now.

And I’m finally done. It took a bit of time, maybe 6 or 7 hours in total to do the updating of the 98 posts, although in fairness, some of that was because I was sucked into reading my own posts again and editing a bit as I went. 🙂

But everything is re-linked. Whew.